[Xantar]

I still think you are arguing ambiguity against specificity. What government are these insurgents professing allegiance to? Also, what armed forces are these people members of? What specific organization, if not government, are they allied to? Your arguments for including them are based on language which you can literally applyto anyone. You could apply your arguments to organized crime if you worded it right and chose to make that argument. I feel like your taking the Devil's Advocate argument and trying to defend its creation into policy, while ignoring the spirit of the document and intentions of its creators.

Who knows what the intentions of the creators were? I could just as well say that you place far too much emphasis on a uniform as criteria for whether or not someone should be waterboarded. And maybe the Geneva Conventions were meant to be vague with regard to its definition of a prisoner of war.

I don't know. I'm not a lawyer yet, and I don't claim to be able to read the Supreme Court's mind. But I just don't think that the mere fact that terrorists claim allegiance to a loose network of cells rather than a fully organized government is a reason to throw out several decades of time-tested and formulated law in the form of the UCMJ and Geneva Convention and make up brand new procedures based on a new definition of the enemy. Do our policies have to be modified? Arguably so. But to take a step back from interpreting the Court's decision for a second, I personally think that the Bush Administration went about it totally the wrong way. There was too little debate about their detainment policies and afterwards there was too little information being given about how many people were getting indicted or charged or released. Major decisions like this can't be trusted to one administration, no matter how wise it is.

I used to think this way too, after everything I've even and read I just don't think these people care. They are looking for excuses to continue the struggle, just like the Israel situation. The biggest danger to these extremists is the resolution of their fight. The struggle is all they have.

Well, first of all, if you're right then I don't understand the wisdom of trying to take the fight to their home land. But more importantly, I'm not concerned with how the terrorists see us. As you pointed out, they will see us as the Great Satan regardless. However, with the erosion of global prestige comes vastly decreased diplomatic power. If war is supposed to be the option of last resort, then we should be ensuring that our position of negotiation is as strong as possible. If we want to be the world's policeman, then we should hold ourselves to a higher moral standard than anybody else. Otherwise, who will care to listen to us?

Look it up, lazy. It was a pretty big deal not too long ago.

Oh fine. I was hoping you could at least give me a case caption. Anyway, I assume you're talking about Kelo v. New London. I read a few hastily thrown together opinions by a judge and a professor, so I won't claim to understand what the hell is going on. The issue here is that eminent domain is an established power of the government. And a previous decision established that a local government can in fact seize a property through eminent domain (although as always it must pay the market price for that property) and then give it over to a private company. I think that New London in this case decided on its own to seize some land and develop it for Pfizer. Had Pfizer asked the town to exercise eminent domain, we'd be in a different boat.

But I'm open to changing my mind on that point because, as I said, I don't feel I've read enough about it.

The main point I want to make is it sounds like rather than actually approving of the seizure, the Court refused to nullify it. I don't know what the Court thought about New London's plan as far as its economic merit, but courts generally don't like to flat out rule against a property condemnation. There's too much precedent to do that lightly. And instead of getting the judicial system mired in the details on a case-by-case basis, the Supreme Court simply overruled the challenge. If that means Congress and state legislatures start moving to limit the impact of the decision as much as possible, I don't think that would bother the Court very much.

Again, I don't know whether I agree with the decision or not. However, what I've read seems to indicate that people in the legal community were not terribly surprised by the decision and that the legislatures and the media were the ones who made a big deal out of it.